May 12, 2021

How to prepare for meetings that convince people

2 minutes

So let's say that you want to convince your coworkers to try a new tech or

something like a new library or whatever and you think it's a really good

idea but people aren't convinced. So what typically happens is you want to

prepare a couple of ideas and stuff and bring it to a meeting and say,

okay, here's here's what I think and why I think this is a good idea.

And then people will present their reasons why they they don't think it's a

good idea. And people may come to the meeting kind of predisposed to

disagree and and want to just say,No this is just extra work that you're

making me do and and so as soon as somebody gives a reasonable good

argument against you against your idea for everybody else that just is like

the thing that they can latch on to and if you're not prepared to deal with

that then then you just lose everything.

So this is what I do and what I've done to convince members of my team that

my idea is a good one. And that is first you have to like that obviously

you have to really believe that it is a good idea and you wouldn't want to

present something that's not necessarily a good idea.

But then,What I have done is I will reach out to everybody who's going to

be coming into the meeting all the decision makers, but also just the

people who are going to show up so even people that may not be making the

decision they just might voice a concern of some kind.

And I will just ask them what are their preconceived issues that they have

with this idea? And I'm just talk a little bit about it not. We're not here

to have an argument or anything about the merits of the idea. We're just

here to gather their hang-ups with it.

And do that with everybody who's coming to the meeting so that you can

prepare and bring up their arguments before they have a chance to bring

them up and and you bring it up in such a way that you can immediately

address it and say now some of you were worried about this, let me explain

why that's not a problem.

Or you may not even need to bring that up. You can just solve that problem

before they before mentioning the problem in the first place. As part of

your presentation, this will go miles to help you convince people that your

idea is a good one and help alleviate concerns and they're concerned.

The real and you need to address them But if you want to have success and

convincing people you want to avoid the mob mentality where one person

shares something that's like now this is not going to work for this reason

and everybody just latches on and they won't listen to your explanation.

And maybe you'll get caught off guard too in that situation. And so by

asking ahead of time you are made aware of things that you may not have

considered and you make sure you address those and it's also possible that

you can cancel a meeting because you realize that oh actually this isn't a

good idea because of these concerns.

So anyway, this is something that's helped me in the past. I hope it helps

you and I hope you.

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By Kent C. Dodds

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